Facebook Launches New WordPress Tool

Facebook announced sweeping integrations for WordPress.org and WordPress.com VIP users on Tuesday morning — allowing you to add your blog content to the social network in one click.

The integrations are accessible through a Facebook for WordPress plugin (available here) and allow bloggers and administrators of WordPress-based sites to cross-publish content to WordPress, their own Facebook Timelines and the Facebook Pages they oversee.

“The plugin was built by Facebook engineers in collaboration with open source partners, and makes it simple for anyone to make their WordPress site more social – no coding required,” Facebook engineer Matt Kelly wrote in a blog post introducing the tool.

WordPress powers more than 16% of the web, and Facebook, by all appearances, wants to be the web for its more than 900 million users. So, in that context, the integration makes quite a lot of sense for both parties.

Facebook appears to be angling to become a destination site for original, non-user-generated content — as well as more of a gateway to the wider web.

In the example above, you can see how site administrators will now be able to mention the names of friends and other entities with Facebook profiles to more widely distribute content. The example below shows how content managers and creators can use the new tool to share their work with personal networks.

Additional widgets available through Facebook’s new WordPress integration include an activity feed to show readers what their Facebook friends have been up to on your WordPress-powered site; a recommendations plugin that suggests new articles and pages to readers as well as lets them track what they read on their Timelines; customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons; and a comments box allowing readers to cross-post reactions to your site and Facebook.